5 ms·

This is what I came here to say. With comments in the article such as: "CPU designers see vastly more benefit to spending area on, e.g.,vectorized floating-poi

This is what I came here to say. With comments in the article such as: "CPU designers see vastly more benefit to spending area on, e.g.,vectorized floating-point multipliers." followed by "Intel is doubling the vector size in its newest CPUs---again!---this time from 256 bits to 512 bits." Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW.

hutzlibu 10y ago
> Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW More likely the other way around ...
- andrioni 10y ago
  Given that games tend to be deployed on a wide range of computers, it's hard for them to use newer x86 extensions (e.g. AVX), while most scientific computing applications tend to be compiled for a specific machine. To get to see the larger improvements, you must use the newer instructions and registers, like you can see in BLAS benchmarks[1]. [1]: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser
  - daemin 10y ago
    Yep, at my old job we still had to support Windows XP 32 bit for the game client (internal tools were Windows 7 64 bit) as so many people were still playing on systems. I don't remember if we could use SSE2 or what the minimum was in that regard.
  - alfalfasprout 10y ago
    Some compilers support multiple codepaths depending on the supported instruction set. Intel's C++ compiler makes this easy, for instance.
j1vms 10y ago
> Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW. It may in fact be that desktop/mobile CPUs are being optimized for their contemporary benchmark suites, thus targeting the ensuing benefits in marketing. The benchmarks themselves were, for a fair amount of their existence, focused on games-related performance, at least from what I recall.
- j1vms 10y ago
  I don't mind the downvotes, but more interested to know why if anyone cares to comment? I should have specified that by desktop/mobile, I do mean desktop/laptop essentially (and, not smartphone CPUs). And, I am talking about Intel/AMD largely, and how I perceive their evolution over the past two and half decades. In short, I think "optimizing for games" means nothing to a CPU designer at say Intel, and anyways qualitative differences (expanding the ISA, or integrating new features on the IC) are more expensive to develop and sometimes tricky to market. Instead, marketing quantitative differences is much easier (hence optimize for benchmarks) - though arguably no easier to develop. Witness Intel's first rocky attempt at targeting the benchmarks in the early 2000s: Netburst [0]. Of course, in the past 5 years, things have changed (the rise of smartphones, meteoric rise in GPU performance with expanding markets & new software, CPU "per core" performance stagnation), so Intel is in the process of re-positioning itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture)

hutzlibu 10y ago

> Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW More likely the other way around ...

andrioni 10y ago
Given that games tend to be deployed on a wide range of computers, it's hard for them to use newer x86 extensions (e.g. AVX), while most scientific computing applications tend to be compiled for a specific machine. To get to see the larger improvements, you must use the newer instructions and registers, like you can see in BLAS benchmarks[1]. [1]: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser
- daemin 10y ago
  Yep, at my old job we still had to support Windows XP 32 bit for the game client (internal tools were Windows 7 64 bit) as so many people were still playing on systems. I don't remember if we could use SSE2 or what the minimum was in that regard.
- alfalfasprout 10y ago
  Some compilers support multiple codepaths depending on the supported instruction set. Intel's C++ compiler makes this easy, for instance.

j1vms 10y ago

> Seems like they are being optimized to be better at vector math, and games just happen to highly use these pieces of HW. It may in fact be that desktop/mobile CPUs are being optimized for their contemporary benchmark suites, thus targeting the ensuing benefits in marketing. The benchmarks themselves were, for a fair amount of their existence, focused on games-related performance, at least from what I recall.

j1vms 10y ago
I don't mind the downvotes, but more interested to know why if anyone cares to comment? I should have specified that by desktop/mobile, I do mean desktop/laptop essentially (and, not smartphone CPUs). And, I am talking about Intel/AMD largely, and how I perceive their evolution over the past two and half decades. In short, I think "optimizing for games" means nothing to a CPU designer at say Intel, and anyways qualitative differences (expanding the ISA, or integrating new features on the IC) are more expensive to develop and sometimes tricky to market. Instead, marketing quantitative differences is much easier (hence optimize for benchmarks) - though arguably no easier to develop. Witness Intel's first rocky attempt at targeting the benchmarks in the early 2000s: Netburst [0]. Of course, in the past 5 years, things have changed (the rise of smartphones, meteoric rise in GPU performance with expanding markets & new software, CPU "per core" performance stagnation), so Intel is in the process of re-positioning itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture)